A Cloud-Manager-Based Re-Encryption Scheme for Mobile Users in Cloud Environment: a Hybrid Approach

Cloud computing is an emerging computing paradigm that offers on-demand, flexible, and elastic computational and storage services for the end-users. The small and medium-sized business organization having limited budget can enjoy the scalable services of the cloud. However, the migration of the organizational data on the cloud raises security and privacy issues. To keep the data confidential, the data should be encrypted using such cryptography method that provides fine-grained and efficient access for uploaded data without affecting the scalability of the system. In mobile cloud computing environment, the selected scheme should be computationally secure and must have capability for offloading computational intensive security operations on the cloud in a trusted mode due to the resource constraint mobile devices. The existing manager-based re-encryption and cloud-based re-encryption schemes are computationally secured and capable to offload the computationally intensive data access operations on the trusted entity/cloud. Despite the offloading of the data access operations in manager-based re-encryption and cloud-based re-encryption schemes, the mobile user still performs computationally intensive paring-based encryption and decryption operations using limited capabilities of mobile device. In this paper, we proposed Cloud-Manager-based Re-encryption Scheme (CMReS) that combines the characteristics of manager-based re-encryption and cloud-based re-encryption for providing the better security services with minimum processing burden on the mobile device. The experimental results indicate that the proposed cloud-manager-based re-encryption scheme shows significant improvement in turnaround time, energy consumption, and resources utilization on the mobile device as compared to existing re-encryption schemes.